


Somebody Likes You

by renaissance



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Kidfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 23:03:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/804253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa and Margaery ask the Big Questions and Brienne is not quite sure how to answer. Nostalgia ensues.<br/> <br/>Written for the following prompt on the asoiafkinkmeme:<br/><i>Modern, kids on the playground AU</i><br/><i>You know, if a boy picks on you and pulls on your hair it totally means he likes you</i></p><p>(Also there are multiple instances of kids ~12 years old kissing and holding hands in an incredibly innocent manner, so if that isn't your thing then do pass this by.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somebody Likes You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sweetheartbitterheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetheartbitterheart/gifts).



> Yes so before you say "but memorde you promised us a chapter of Before Destruction by the end of this week and also I thought you had an essay to write"... well, I finished the essay earlier than expected and then this prompt took hold of my mind and I couldn't do anything else until I'd written it. And as for BD, yes. That will still happen by Saturday, most probably.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy this bit of fluff that got slightly out of hand!

Sansa asks her if she’s ever been kissed, and she can’t lie, she’s never been able to lie, so Brienne says “yes”. Of course that only leads to more questions.

“Who was he? Or _she_?”

“No, he.”

“Who, then?”

“Just... someone...”

“When was it?”

“… primary school. There was no tongue or anything; it doesn’t really count!”

The answer to that is “shut up, of course it counts”. Brienne lets slip that she was twelve at the time and Margaery decrees that it _definitely_ counts. So they ask again who it was, do they know him, and Brienne bites her lip and nods, a silent confirmation that yes, you know him.

“How did it happen?” Margaery asks.

She’s held the story in for six long years without telling anyone, so Brienne starts from the beginning.

****

Brienne first noticed that Jaime Lannister existed in her first ever year of school. She was five years old and her dad had started inviting this woman Maria around more than Brienne ever invited her friends over – even though she didn’t really have many friends – and it was beginning to dawn on her that girls could like boys in ways other than just being friends. Not like love. Her dad had been in love with her mother, love was different. This was something new. This was _like_. She wondered for a while if she _liked_ her best friend Renly. He was always nice to her, not like some of the other kids, but she didn’t _like_ him enough to invite him over at night and let him into her bedroom. She didn’t want his cooties near her, even though she had a sneaking suspicion that cooties were a fabrication, so she decided that she only liked Renly. She didn’t _like_ him. In fact, she didn’t really _like_ anyone. And that was ok.

Jaime Lannister probably didn’t like anyone either, since he never sat near girls, presumably to avoid their girl germs. But then one day in class his twin sister Cersei kissed him – kissed him on the _lips_! – and their teacher got _really angry_ and pulled them both out of class. Brienne asked Renly why she had kissed him, and he said it was probably because she _liked_ him. Neither of them came to school for the next week, and when they returned, well... only Jaime returned. The rumour was that Cersei had been sent to Catholic school. Brienne asked Renly why Cersei had to be sent to another school, and he said it was because you’re not supposed to _like_ people in your family. Brienne wished her dad had taught her all this.

Jaime was really angry at everyone once his sister left the school. He started getting in trouble, and earned himself a reputation as being Bad. He talked back to teachers and didn’t do his homework and wrote rude words on tables in pencil. He was a bit scary. Brienne decided that she didn’t like him.

Then one day he decided that he didn’t like Brienne.

 

When she was six he took a texta from her desk without asking. She told him that he should have asked first, and he told her that she was dumb. No-one asks for textas, he said. It’s just a stupid texta. She told him that you always ask. _Always_. Even when you know they’d say yes. She would have said yes if he’d asked. She told him so. He insisted that she was stupid and threw the texta at her head. It hit her in the eye and she cried for ten minutes from the pain. Jaime got sent to detention and Brienne got sent to sick bay. Her eye was swollen and red and she had to wear an eyepatch for a week. Jaime got off with a scolding.

Once the eyepatch was off he told her she’d looked better with it. She would have punched him in the face, but Renly held her back.

 

When she was seven they fought on the jungle gym. She was playing pirates with Renly and their new friend Margaery – Brienne and Renly were the swashbuckling buccaneers (words that had no meaning to them, but definitely meant “pirates”) and Margaery was the damsel they’d kidnapped, who actually thought they were really cool in the end, because _everyone_ thinks pirates are cool. But then Jaime and his friend Addam had decided they wanted the jungle gym to themselves, even though there were heaps of kids playing on it. So what they wanted was _wrong_ , and Brienne hated when things were wrong.

He told them to get off, and she told him no.

He told her he’d ask nicely if he had to, and she told him she didn’t believe that.

He pushed her, and she pushed him back.

Within moments they were wrestling atop the plateau leading into the slide, punching each other and kicking and rolling, sometimes with Jaime pinning Brienne down and pulling at her long messy hair, other times with her on top, forcing her fists into his stomach. Someone had gone to call a teacher but it was too late, somehow he managed to drag her to the edge and they tumbled down the slide, still grabbing on to each other and kicking. They hit the mulch with a loud crunch and Jaime screamed like a baby. Brienne screamed too. She rolled off him immediately and jumped to her feet, unable to turn her eyes away as he looked at his right arm, bent at an unnatural angle, in pure terror.

“You broke my arm!” he shouted. Two teachers entered the scene, bending over him, worrying and fussing. “She broke my arm!”

When one of the teachers gave her an accusing glare, Brienne’s head drooped and she wrung her hands together so tightly that her knuckles turned white. “He started it,” she mumbled.

Jaime had a month off school so that his arm could recover. Brienne had a month of after school detentions cleaning blackboards.

 

When she was eight, Brienne was invited to Jaime Lannister’s birthday party. She didn’t go, not after he had spread the rumour that she’d broken his arm because she was an evil witch or some rubbish like that. It was a no-win situation – either she went to his party and suffered him teasing her there, or she didn’t go, and suffered him teasing her for not going. She chose the latter.

It was fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, that another rumour was started about Brienne to distract her from Jaime’s merciless name-calling. Brienne _likes_ Renly. She only found out about it when Renly took her aside at lunch one day and told her that he didn’t _like_ her, not in _that_ way. She told him that she didn’t either and was glad they’d sorted that out. He asked if she’d heard the rumours, she asked him what rumours? Someone had been spreading it, he said, so he had just needed to check. Of course. They were making it up, she told him.

Her dad found out about the rumours, and about the teasing. He was bound to find out eventually. He told her she needed to spend more time around girls – all the boys she sat with were a bad influence. So she joined the netball team. The PE teacher accepted her straight up because she was the tallest girl in the grade. She was made to play Goal Keeper, and all she had to do was stand in her quarter of the court and look menacing so that the other team’s Goal Shooter would miss all their shots. Sometimes she would be Goal Shooter, where her height was an advantage too. Once she was put in Centre, and the other team’s Centre ended up hospitalised. They never did that again.

As dangerous as she was in netball, it turned out Jaime was more dangerous in the soccer team. He boasted all the time about how many goals he kicked, and regaled the playground with tales of his triumphs, to great rounds of laughter and cheering. Then he broke his right arm (again) on the field and no-one was laughing anymore.

****

When she was nine Brienne came to school early one Friday morning and found a note sellotaped to her bag hook. She was hesitant to read it; it was probably another cruel joke about her height or her freckles or her hair or her braces, the kind she was used to hearing from Jaime, but still managed to bring her close to tears when she thought about them. But her name was written on it in impeccable running writing and curiosity got the better of her so she pulled it off neatly, careful not to rip the note, and unfolded it. There were three words and nothing else:

“ _Somebody likes you_.”

She shook her head and sighed. She had seen that in the Simpsons the night before. Lisa got Milhouse to pass the note to Nelson, but he thought it was from Milhouse and Milhouse was carried off on a stretcher. Brienne had a sneaking suspicion that she was the Nelson in all of this, and that Jaime was Milhouse. And there was no Lisa. Lisa was Jaime playing a cruel trick on her. She was meant to think it was from him and punch him in the gut and get in trouble for punching him. That was how it tended to go. Plus, she and Jaime hadn’t fought since he’d broken his arm the second time. He was probably itching for a fight.

She scrunched the note up and shoved it into that part of her backpack where excursion permission forms went to die.

Only a week later it happened again. And again. It _kept happening_. And every time, the notes said exactly the same thing. And Jaime said nothing. There was no indication that this was him pulling some grand prank on her. So she thought, well maybe it wasn’t him after all. Maybe there really was a Lisa.

Even though she didn’t _like_ anyone, she _loved_ getting the notes.

After a while she retrieved all of the scrunched up ones from the bottom of her bag and flattened them out, keeping them in a tupperware box in a drawer in her bedroom, adding each new one to the collection as it arrived and writing on the date when she received it with very faint pencil.

****

When she was ten, Brienne finally got her pen license. When the notes began to be written in black ballpoint, she took extra care not to pay attention to what people in her class wrote with. She didn’t want to know who was sending her the notes, she had decided. She hadn’t even told Renly about it, even though a small part of her hoped that he was sending them – the notes would be her secret. She had thought that somebody _liking_ her would be the strangest thing ever, but then life decided to surprise her and something even stranger happen.

It was lunch and Renly and Margaery were holding hands and the moment Brienne had noticed, she’d decided that she wanted her own company more than anything else, so she bought a fruit tube from the canteen and disappeared behind the school hall, where it was always quiet. It was a bit smelly, but that was what the fruit tube was for. When she finished eating it, much more quickly than she had anticipated, and the bell still hadn’t gone off, she rolled the plastic tube up as small as she could manage with her wide fingers, and then let it spring back again. She was so involved that she didn’t notice when the sun was blocked by someone standing over her until he said her name.

“Brienne?”

She looked up quickly and frowned. “What do you want, Jaime?”

“Ron said you went missing. I wondered if you were ok.”

“Why do you care?”

He shrugged and sat down next to her, and the sun hit her straight in the eyes. She blinked at the afterimage and gave him a sideways look.

“Maybe I think we’ve fought each other too much and should just... stop, or something,” he said quietly. “Maybe I want to be your friend.”

Well if it was just friendship he wanted, what could be the harm in giving it a try?

After school they went to the park together and monopolised the swings for fifteen minutes, not even looking at each other in the unspoken contest to see who could get the highest. Brienne was so nervous. She’d never had to make friends; generally Renly made them for her and she became known by association. And Jaime had hated her since they’d first met. He was doing most of the talking. She didn’t know what to say to him now.

They climbed the biggest tree and when they were near the top, Jaime looked at her with the most curious expression she’d ever seen on his face. “I think I like you better when I’m mean to you,” he said, measuring his words out slowly as though was not quite sure of them himself. But then his face broadened into a grin. “Race you to the bottom, Buckteeth!”

****

When she was eleven, Brienne was most certainly _not_ Jaime Lannister’s friend. He had taken to calling her The Beast, because she was so tall and broad. She had always been tall, but now she was the tallest in the grade, and he hated having that taken away from him, she thought. She didn’t know quite when she’d grown so much, but it had happened, and suddenly all her shoes were too small for her and her skirts too short and her shirts too tight. She didn’t even get boobs like all the other tall girls, just wider shoulders. And she’d really been looking forward to getting boobs. Jaime had typed “55378008” into his calculator and, leaning backwards in his chair (which is _really_ dangerous!), held it upside down in her face during one maths lesson, telling her that he had solved her.

He really didn’t need to add “Get it? Boobless!” to make his point.

The only good part about being a head taller than most of the girls and built like a plank was that Brienne became the champion of the netball team. She was always Goal Shooter, and the team always won. Her dad came to every game and cheered from the sidelines.

For the first time in years, the school had a netball team in the grand finals. The game was in the afternoon on a Friday, and all day Brienne was getting encouraging grins from her fellow students, and even the occasional “good luck”. It was a new experience, and it made it a little less painful to think there had been no note on her bag hook that morning, unlike every other Friday that year, and that she had seen Renly and Margaery kiss at recess beneath the monkey bars. She put that out of her mind. Jaime hadn’t even been at school that day to pick on her, and she was feeling top of the world.

It was only after they won the match that she realised that the other team’s Centre was Cersei Lannister. Brienne didn’t know if she would remember her, but she’d shot so many goals that she momentarily forgot that she didn’t actually know how to start a conversation and ran up to the girl, pretty and blonde and the very image of her brother.

“Hey! Cersei!” Brienne dashed up to her, her GS vest still flapping loosely around her chest.

“Do I know you?” The look of disdain on Cersei’s face was familiar from Jaime, but there was something much colder about it.

“You, uh. You probably don’t remember me. We were in the same class for a bit, years ago, before you, uh, left the school.”

Cersei gave her a blank smile. “You’re Jaime’s friend,” she said. “The tall one with big teeth and freckles. Brianne, right?”

“Uh, Brienne. Yeah. Jaime’s, uh. Yeah.”

She smirked. “He talks about you all the time.”

“He does?”

“No, not really.”

There was an awkward silence, but when Cersei didn’t walk away, Brienne spoke. “He, uh, wasn’t at school today...”

“He broke his arm again,” Cersei said bluntly. “Fell into the pool. Trying to dive, or something. He told me to watch but I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Brienne’s eyes bulged. “Oh my god, really? I– I mean, is he ok?”

“He’ll be fine,” she said with one final false smile, turned on her heel and walked away. Brienne stared dumbly at the space which Cersei had just vacated, her brain blank.

****

When she was twelve, Jaime had reconstructive surgery on his right arm. After being thrice-broken, he was apparently told he’d need some sort of metal reinforcement in it or he’d never move the arm again. He was away from school for a fortnight and Brienne was forced to face the realisation that it was the most boring fortnight of her life. Renly spent all his time with Margaery now, and she really did _not_ want to intrude on that, so she sat with Ron and Hyle and all those boys she didn’t really like but tolerated out of circumstance. They were poor company, and their jibes were a poor replacement for Jaime’s continual teasing. To add insult to injury, her secret admirer had stopped sending her notes. There hadn’t been any for a couple of months, and she was starting to worry that they didn’t _like_ her anymore, or worse, that it had all just been a big prank.

But the absolute _worst_ feeling that hit her over that fortnight was that she missed Jaime more than she missed the notes. Stupid, rude Jaime who called her a bucktoothed boobless beast and tripped her in the carpeted corridors, who took her pens without asking and drew penises in her art book, who stole her lunch money from her bag in the mornings and bought her meat pies since she’d told him they were her least favourite.

On his first day back after the time off he had his arm in a bright red sling and was showing off to everyone that he now had a “bionic arm”. Brienne was no idiot, she knew what a bionic arm was and it sure as heck wasn’t an arm with a couple of bits of metal where there might once have been bone. But she couldn’t bring herself to correct him, not even when he told her that he’d paid for her meat pie with his own “bionic money”, so she withdrew from the crowds around him and sat behind the hall to eat the stupid pie. It was becoming something of a ritual, even though Margaery always asked her to sit with her and Renly.

She was playing with the plastic slip that the pie had come in when he joined her. This time there was no ceremony; he just sat down beside her.

“We’re going to different schools next year.” It wasn’t a question. They’d discussed it a bit in class, with more people around, and she remembered that he’d almost looked disappointed when she’d said where she was going.

“No,” she said, even though it hadn’t been a question.

He shoved her lightly with his good arm so she gave him a half-hearted push back.

“Try not to miss me too much,” he said.

She turned to look at him, and they caught each other smiling. “I won’t even think of you more than once a month,” she promised him.

Then he kissed her.

 

Brienne didn’t see Jaime for the next four years. She went to high school with Margaery and Renly, and gradually the rumours changed from “Brienne _likes_ Renly” to “Renly likes _boys_ ”, and people stopped calling her Brienne The Beast, and she finally managed to fill an A cup, and she grew her hair long and got rid of her braces, and began to feel less uncomfortable in her stature and more comfortable in coaching junior netball and watching the expressions when they realised that she could touch the hoop without even standing on her toes.

She’d become a lot more comfortable around Margaery once Renly had stopped holding her hand, and started making out in public with her older brother Loras. And Sansa was definitely the nicest person she knew, someone who had never commented on her height or her teeth or _anything_ , not even once. So she supposes if anyone would know the story of her first (and only) kiss, it would have to be them.

“Hold on,” Margaery says, “we are talking about the same Jaime Lannister, right? The same Jaime Lannister who catches the train all the way with you every afternoon even though his stop is like five before yours?”

“The same Jaime Lannister who broke his bionic wrist punching a guy who called you ugly?” Sansa adds.

“The same Jaime Lannister who texts you every five minutes?”

“The same Jaime Lannister who you text back straight away every single time?”

“The same Jaime Lannister who asked you out in front of the entire netball team last night?”

“The same Jaime Lannister who you kicked in the shin for asking you out in front of the entire netball team last night?” Sansa’s mouth twitches and Brienne can tell she’s trying not to laugh.

“You said yes,” Margaery reminds her.

They stand there in silence while Brienne tries incredibly hard not to blush, but she gets the feeling that she’s failing.

Margaery gasps, and puts her hands on Brienne’s shoulders as though something shocking has just occurred to her. “Oh, Brienne!"

Brienne raises her eyebrows. “What?"

“I think he _likes_ you!”

**Author's Note:**

> (With apologies to Desi because I totally stole the idea of Cersei getting Brienne's name wrong from your fic so if you're reading this thank you and I'm sorry)
> 
>  
> 
> Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment box below! ;D


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